radio nut

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

He would have turned a hundred this
year. Gordon Hathaway. Sonny Drysdale. Raise a glass (better still, as Gordon
advised on his Heigh-Ho Madison
Avenue album, hoist some “Martinis and Miltown”). Or offer a heartfelt “Boola
boola” as raccoon-coated Sonny did on more than one episode of The Beverly Hillbillies.

Steve Allen, it’s been persuasively
argued, was the first hip spy in the house of TV, abetting the earliest visitations
by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jack Kerouac, Frank Zappa, the Collins Kids and
countless other outsiders to millions of American living room; he “had the true
spirit of a comic anarchist fluttering like a red flag in his soul,” wrote
James Wolcott.

Louis Nye (1913-2005) was among the more
subversive offerings of Allen’s late-Fifties/early-Sixties show. Appearing
weekly in skits and ‘Man on the Street’ bits, Nye’s Gordon Hathaway wasn’t
merely funny, batting his eyes, cocking coy smiles, dropping Mad-Ave and Greenwich
Village jargon into his exchanges with Allen. He was a cultural signifier of a
half dozen things that, much like race and ethnicity, official America found
too taboo to talk about. He was a louche aesthete and style cat, an uninhibited
wit who couldn’t tell you who won last week’s big game, who was maybe gay, who hung
with bohemians and cracked about getting high. Walking into frame in his thin
tie, button-down Gant and Tyrolean hat, Gordon (whose shtick was usually written
by Allen staffers Stan Burns and Herb Sargent) confounded prevailing notions of
how guy-hood was supposed to play. If Lord Buckley was the Fifties’ avatar of
the Sixties, Gordon Hathaway was, in his own way, the coal-mine canary that
brought news of much that society would eventually accept and respect.

Nye’s brief (1962) run as Clampett
banker Mr. Drysdale’s playboy son Sonny was juicy if wildly anachronistic; The Beverly Hillbillies’ writers wrote
the eternal college student as a prancing refuge from the Thirties. It was as
Gordon Hathaway that Nye killed, with heavy doses of sly and silly—not just on
Allen’s show, but on singles like “Teenage Beatnik” (“I like to cha-cha in my Bermuda
shorts” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPh6fxIxBiM)
and LPs like Heigh-ho Madison Avenue and Here’s Nye in Your Eye, where the
proto-Mad Men tropes fly fast and furious (“Let’s toss it down the well and
check it for splash”). If you can find the latter set, dig “Hipster in a Bank”
and be set free.